Cain pictured Mona Castelli, getting ready to go out.
Here she is, 7:02 p.m., waiting inside the house. Pacing around, a martini in her hand. Through the window, she sees the car rolling up. She puts on her jacket and grabs her purse. Sets the drink on the table by the door and goes out to the front porch, phone in hand. The door clicks shut behind her; she swipes her phone as she walks to the car. She arms the system as her driver gets out and helps her into the backseat. She either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that she’s leaving a record.
It all fit with what he’d heard. He looked at the next two entries.
Front Door—Opened—10:35 p.m.
System Disarmed (H.C.)—10:36 p.m.
“Why did Castelli open the door first, and then turn off the alarm?” Fischer asked. “How would that work?”
“Maybe he didn’t know it was armed,” Roger said.
“Castelli’s initials are on the log—if he disarmed the alarm from the control panel and not his phone, how does the system know it was him?”
“It’s got a thumbprint reader. It couldn’t have been anyone but him.”
Cain looked at the screen. Based on the log, after Castelli had come home, the house had been quiet for nearly five hours. The system didn’t log gunshots, didn’t record the slack thump of a body collapsing from the desk to the rug. By midnight, Castelli was dead. But was the house actually quiet the whole time? No one had come in or out. No door swung open, no window slid up. Nothing triggered the laser trip lines protecting the backyard and the cliff stairs. Each point in the system had a status bar, and everything was quiet.
The next entry was at 2:58 a.m., when the front door opened. It had to be Mona Castelli, because her car had dropped her off somewhere close to three.
Cain let it play out in his mind: She comes into the entry hall, dropping her keys and purse on the table near the door. Stumbling to the kitchen, she pours another drink. She wanders upstairs with it, looking for her husband. The bedroom’s empty. The doors to all the bathrooms are standing open, and the lights are off. She tries the study door, but it’s locked. She knocks and there’s no answer.
The next log entry was at 3:22 a.m. The front door opened. Cain watched that, too: Nagata steps inside, catching Mona. She’d opened the door, but now she can barely stand up. In eight minutes, Nagata will start calling Cain. First she tries to get the story. What happened? Where’s Harry? She checks the house and sees the study door, the spare key jutting from the heavy antique lock. She doesn’t go in.
Cain looked at Fischer.
“What do you think?”
“I think you better throw a search warrant together, unless Mr. Petrovic wants to burn a disk right now.”
“Bring the paper,” Roger said. “There’s a privacy clause in all the contracts. No information released unless compelled by a court.”
“All right,” Cain said. It was only one o’clock. “You going to be here all day, or should we serve your office?”
“Here’s good—I know what you want.”
“I might need till four o’clock,” Cain said.
“I’ll be here.”
17
AFTER LEAVING THE Petrovics’, they’d gone briefly back into Castelli’s study. Sumida’s team hadn’t finished photographing it yet, and the evidence was still in place. While Fischer called Melissa Montgomery to get Alexa’s address, Cain gave Sumida his keys and asked him to have someone drive his car back to Bryant Street and leave it there. He looked out the blood-speckled window at the street below. There were mobile news vans everywhere, telescoping antennas rising like masts along the street. Greenberg had been sworn in at City Hall, and the CSI vans were still in Castelli’s driveway. It had only been a matter of time. He could even hear a helicopter, maybe the Channel 2 NewsChopper. Whatever it was, it had been circling awhile now, invisible above the inversion layer, waiting for the fog to clear so that it could shoot something for the evening news.
But none of these people would get the footage they really wanted. Dr. Levy had backed her morgue van up to the garage and loaded Castelli’s body bag directly into the back without ever taking him outside. There’d have been no way to see it from the street or from above.
When Fischer had what she needed from Melissa Montgomery, they left. They stripped off their gloves and plastic boots, then crossed the tape line at the edge of the driveway and pushed through the waiting reporters to reach Fischer’s car.
“They’re not following us, are they?” Cain asked.
“They’d stick out if they did,” Fischer said. “Vans like that.”
“Keep an eye out anyway.”
Her eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, then went back to the front. She was driving down Geary, Cain sitting in the passenger seat.
“Back there, you asked me what I thought,” Fischer said. She took her foot off the gas, let her sedan creep back to the speed limit. “I’ll tell you—what I really think. It’s got to be suicide, right?”